An exile at home

By Joanne HaydenMarch 4 2002

John Banville: "The only way to be in exile from Ireland now is to live in Ireland. Ireland is everywhere. It's ubiquitous."

John Banville has no interest in places. We're in Dublin, in a dark corner of
a designer hotel by the river Liffey. He is recalling another time, another
city, another hotel. A few years ago he was in Toronto for a festival. He spent
the afternoon sitting on the bed in his underwear, reading a novel.

"I was really bored,'' he says. ``I like to go to places for short sharp
visits. Like Philip Larkin said - he'd love to go to China if he could come back
the same day.''

When he first travelled to Australia he had a short sharp deja vu.

"I left London at 7 o'clock in the evening. I flew over Europe, the Indian
sub-continent, South-East Asia, stopped very briefly in Bangkok, arrived in
Melbourne, looked around and thought `Christ almighty it's Dublin!' It was a
grey day. There were people walking around with a plastic bag attached to each
finger. And lots of Catholics. I could see straight away lots of Catholics.''

His next book, Shroud, is set in Turin. But he says it could be set
anywhere.

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"A friend of mine met Samuel Beckett one day on the street in Turin. Beckett
always stopped in Turin on his way to Paris. And my friend said to Beckett `Do
you like Turin?' And Beckett said `I love it, it looks exactly like a cemetery'.
Which it does - full of marble statues. So I put this line into the book. But I
have the narrator in it saying `Turin is no more interesting to me than anywhere
else'.''

Such sweeping dismissals of place may make Banville sound a bit like Macon
Leary in The Accidental Tourist but, like the caustic, anti-sentimental
narrators of his novels, he is comfortable with deadpan humour and wry,
ostensibly self-deprecating irony. He has a well-stocked cellar of stories.
Occasionally, he even allows himself to be upbeat. He says he loves the ``lack
of stuffiness'' in Australia and had a ``whale of a time'' in Melbourne, when he
came for the writers' festival. When 700 people turned up to hear him speak, he
was looking over his shoulder for Seamus Heaney or Roddy Doyle.

Banville never wanted to be an Irish writer. He grew up during the 1950s,
finding his small Wexford hometown dispiritingly dull. Reading and, from the age
of 12, writing, were his forms of escape. At 17 he left Wexford to become an
airline clerk, a career he took a break from in order to travel. He ended up in
Berkeley, California. It was 1968. Anti-war protests were raging. In May, Paris
exploded. He can still remember seeing his first Afro on Telegraph Avenue,
tasting his first avocado pear. He was 23. His experiences there, he says,
changed his life forever. He met his future wife and returned to Ireland, though
never in spirit.

"I just lodge here. No Irish writer ever emigrated. He always went into
exile. The only way to be in exile from Ireland now is to live in Ireland.
Ireland is everywhere. It's ubiquitous.''

Back home he began working as a sub-editor in the Irish Press and has, to a
greater or lesser extent, been connected to print journalism ever since. From
1989 to 1998 he was literary editor of The Irish Times. He is still a
prolific literary journalist. His parallel careers are, he says, two
``completely airtight compartments''.

"Being literary editor kept me off the streets. When I was young I could
write for eight hours a day. Later on I couldn't write for more than three
hours. What would I have done with the rest of the day? Gone out drinking
probably.''

He began writing fiction with two daunting giants at his shoulder. James
Joyce had put everything in. Beckett had thrown everything out. It was difficult
for Irish writers of his generation to find a voice. He looked for ``different
mythologies''. He read broadly and voraciously - European poetry, philosophy,
people such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch. He thinks skipping university had
its advantages. He was unafraid to tackle sacred subjects like the great famine,
which stalks the Ireland of Birchwood, his blackly comic novel steeped in Gothic
and baroque.

Comedy is an important and often underappreciated element of Banville's work.
He may have decided to be a European writer, to work outside rather than inside
the Irish literary tradition, but his sceptical humour has echoes of Beckett in
particular and of Joyce and George Bernard Shaw.

Since his debut, Long Lankin, was published in 1970, he has written 11
novels, his rigorously observational style becoming more intense, more
sophisticated with each. His books are often categorised though there are
overlaps. Dr Copernicus and Kepler are both fictional biographies as well as
scientific books. The Untouchable is a fictional biography and, like
The Book of Evidence and Eclipse, a confessional narrative.

His novels are set in different times, in different minds, but ultimately
they are about language and ideas, about dethroning absolutes. In his fictions
there is no one reality; the artistic imagination is potent, identity is
mercurial, history is twisted by perspective. The tone is pessimistic. The
peripheral action - the colour of the mist, the wink of the moon, the way the
light falls on a blade of grass - carries almost as much weight as plot. His
style is elaborate but not overburdened. His prose is lyrical, often seeming
more like poetry.

Readers might complain about the lack of human interest in his books but he's
trying, he says, to ``shift man from this notion of being at the centre of the
universe''.

"We thought for a long time that we were the masters of nature, that we could
do exactly what we wanted. We're discovering now that that is not the case. I
think we live in a post-humanist age and any artist working in any serious way
is going to be working in a post-humanist mode. That doesn't mean that I would
like to see the human race wiped out, although I sometimes think it would be
quite a good idea. The world would be far better off without us. But we'd lose a
lot. There might be another Mozart in the making for all we know and it would be
terrible to think that that possibility would die and that the ants would take
over.''

In 1989, The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In the eyes of the book trade and some of the public, Banville was born.

Freddie Montgomery, the narrator of the novel, is awaiting trial for the
murder of a young woman. In prison he has become an expert on 17th-century Dutch
painting. Victor Maskell, the narrator of The Untouchable, Banville's
most controversial and arguably most memorable work, is similar in ways to
Montgomery. Maskell is curator of the Queen's pictures, an expert on the painter
Poussin, a knight, a homosexual, a double agent and an Irishman in England.

The Untouchable was based on the ``Cambridge spies''. Maskell's
character was based on the real-life Anthony Blunt. In Ireland, in Australia and
elsewhere, the book was lauded. In England it was reviewed less enthusiastically
- ``savagely'' says Banville. I wonder what he thinks, five years and two books
later, about the reaction of some English critics.

"I think that people, probably without realising it, just felt resentful that
an Irishman was coming over and dealing with these subjects,'' he says. ``Every
single review that appeared in England found some detail that I'd got wrong. I
wanted to get a sign to wear around my neck saying `It's a novel, Stupid'.''

He no longer reads reviews. He finds this liberating. Like Berkeley in '68.

"I think reviewers who don't write fiction themselves or poetry or whatever
don't realise that for the most part their criticisms are not half as harsh as
the writer himself or herself has made. I mean, I hate all the books. I hate
them all without exception.''

In a fantasy, he has magic powers. He clicks his fingers and all the pages of
all his books go blank. He still finds publication dates traumatic.

"I met a friend of mine. It was when Eclipse was coming out. She
said `How are you?' I said `Oh God. I've a book coming out. I feel as if I'm
walking through the streets naked'. She said `Yes. And carrying your X-ray
plates'.''

The narrator of Shroud, due out in September, is, he says, the last
in his series of "self-hating, murderous people''. His next project is a
``little book about childhood'', for which he will, amazingly enough, draw on
some of his own childhood memories. He says he spent ``idyllic'' summers at the
seaside. Then, realising he's sounding shockingly out of character, he checks
himself. ``It'll probably all fail,'' he says. ``It'll probably turn into some
evil twisted book as usual.''

But there may be grounds for optimism. Writing is not what Banville does.
It's who he is. He's found his apprenticeship long and littered with difficulty,
but in the past five years or so, he says, he can do more with words than he
thought he could. He's grave, earnest. There's no hint of irony now. He thinks,
he tells me, though says he may be mistaken, that he's finally begun to learn
how to write.

John Banville is a guest at this week's Adelaide Writers' Week. Eclipse
is published by Picador. Along with Michael Frayn, he will speak about his work
at 3pm on Saturday at the Comedy Club 380 Lygon Street, Carlton. For tickets
phone 9347 6633.